Posted
by
msmash
on Saturday March 26, 2016 @01:38PM
from the forward-thinking dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report on NDTV: The Indian government is working on a scheme to provide electric cars on zero down payment for which people can pay out of their savings on expensive fossil fuels, for becoming 100% electric vehicle nation by 2030. "India can become the first country of its size which will run 100 per cent of electric vehicles. We are trying to make this program self-financing," said Piyush Goyal, Power Minister. That's forward thinking. However, it's not clear whether the Indian government is also committing to 100% renewable energy -- because if the electricity comes from coal, it might not help with curtailing the pollution level.

They are obviously expecting prices to fall fast, as is everyone. Tesla are due to announce their $35k (before tax breaks etc) model in a few days. Nissan and Renault are expected to announce 200 mile range models in the same or lower price bracket this year.

2030 is ambitious but not unreasonable. There will be a lot of used battery packs with hundreds of miles range in them by then too.

And just where did you get that idea? Do you magically think that suddenly everyone will buy a Tesla? In my recent travels to China I asked some of the locals about something I thought was strange, there was a HUGE number of electric motorbikes on the road. The answer was simple, the government limited vehicles with internal combustion engines, but people still needed to get around. Buying a moped and converting it to electric not only got around this ruling but was dirt cheap which was important given the

Most of your basic consumers in India and China will not care if the car cannot do 0-100 in 5 seconds. They also won't be put off by range being 100 miles.As long as they can get to/from neighboring villages and cities in a reasonable time for work. Then there is also the bonus of it requiring far less maintenance etc.

I'm sure that the auto industry could knock up a super cheap EV for these situations.

"We know electric vehicles cost much and many people are poor, but we will pass laws to make them be rich"

The people's car doesn't have to be a Tesla --- it only has to be affordable.

Henry Ford didn't begin with a luxury car, he began with basic transportation and branched out from there. It is a strategy that works even when your up-market competitors have deep pockets and technical sophistication.

Coal power might not be much cleaner than internal combustion engines in the long run (though possibly more efficient due to economies of scale), but it's easier N faster to replace a power plant as better generation technologies become available or economically feasible than to replace everyone's car. Once the cars are electric, they automatically benefit from any changes in how the electricity is made without any action or investment by the end user.

Once the cars are electric, they automatically benefit from any changes in how the electricity is made without any action or investment by the end user.

Yes. I totally agree.

Compare this with the logistics complexities to introduce new types of fuels (either deploying biofuel alternative, or something more fundamentally different like hydrogen).

Deployment of electric car make subsequently moving to greener power plant easier than moving to greener fuels.

And that's neglecting even slight advantages of fossil power-plant over cars:Power plants only need to be efficient, they don't need to compromise on size and weight to be put inside a travelling car, unlike an internal combustion engine.

Having a huge number of batteries connected to the grid also helps smooth out renewables and provide backup where the grid itself is unreliable.

Also, India is trying to build up its car industry. This should help get new technologies developed. I think people are looking at Tesla and thinking that for the first time in decades a new manufacturer can be successful.

That's a very lossy way to do things. Instead of thinking in base load and storage terms consider how we now have lots of tiny little units that can be brought online to follow demand. You don't need to "smooth out renewables", you just need to distribute them all over the place and use them as needed as is happening in many places.

Having a huge number of batteries connected to the grid also helps smooth out renewables and provide backup where the grid itself is unreliable.

No, it doesn't, because the very first accessory I'll get for any electric car I might own will be a grid smarts stripper which ensures it starts loading batteries as soon as I plug it in, and keeps them full. I'm not going to subsidy the electric company by either paying for a bigger battery pack than I need, nor replacing it more often due to the extra wear and t

There is a difference between investing all of your profit per car into increasing production capacity, and actually losing money on each car. Tesla's profit margin on the Model S is 25%. They invest all of this and more in building their production line for their lower cost Model 3, as well as in battery production. The losing money per car meme is GM and fossil fuel industry FUD.

No, it really isn't. You need to understand the difference between gross and net profit margin.

I call BS. It costs very little per kg of gasoline to produce, refine and ship. Even with hydro-cracking your still only going to be a few Wh behind an electric car. A few miles at best. It is why we used it and why it so cheap.

However a power station running on crude or heavy fuel oil (we don't do this much any more) would be a net saving and power stations with bottoming cycles and duel use of waste heat are 50% or better. While the best cars are about 35% to 40% if you drive like grandma. Electric di

"India's National Solar Mission was approved "in principal" last week by the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change.The solar mega-project, aimed at expanding India's solar capacity from the current 3 megawatts (MW) to a reported 20 gigawatts (GW) by 2020 and 200 GW by 2050, will form the centerpiece of a National Climate Change Strategy and cost an estimated US$20 billion to implement.

They are not looking to bring more coal online. In fact, this plan is being coupled with solar power generation and win

The other consideration is air quality within urban centres. A lot of people seem to forget that emissions standards were implemented due to air quality within cities, rather than the state of the environment globally. I suspect that is what India is trying to accomplish: shifting electricity production outside of the city through the use of electric vehicles shifts much of the pollutants outside of highly populated areas. Given the high population densities in parts of India, it is a larger consideratio

Don't they have drivers of small motorcycle-like taxis in India that can't even afford the taxi they're driving? How the heck are those going to all be converted to electric? There must me tens of thousands of them.

They're called Auto rickshaws [wikipedia.org] and they're actually pretty damned handy. India has something more like traffic loose guidelines more than they have traffic laws, and these make it work. They're a lot more simple in terms of design so it wouldn't be too difficult to build an electric motor and replace the existing one. They're fun as well and far more economical as a short range taxi than European or American cabs. I wouldn't mind seeing them adopted in more American cities where it makes sense, especially in the parts of California where it's typically pleasant.

The big problem is that India's grid is already over stressed and has problems keeping up as is, and this is in a country where a lot of people live in poverty and don't have any access to power. Putting all of the countries vehicles on that grid isn't going to work without a massive overhaul of the infrastructure. Maybe this plan or goal is the impetus to make that happen as well, but as things currently stand it's utterly impossible even if they could make the electric vehicles inexpensively.

I was going to say Rickshaw, but I thought that was Chinese. Thank for for that information.

What I'm trying to say is, Auto Rickshaws don't look well maintained to me. I know the driver makes pennies an hour. So either the owner is keeping all the profit, or there is no profit because they must pay someone to do business in that area. How do you get them to 'invest' in a brand new electric engine for their Rickshaw? They would rather go back to the days before the motor.

The big problem is that India's grid is already over stressed and has problems keeping up as is

Another way to look at it is because they have to expand it anyway why not consider doing a bit more than meeting current demand. That's the way we used to do things in the west, and while we don't do it any more there is no reason to be critical of another place doing what we used to do when we had the will to succeed in the long term instead of just get a good balance sheet this quarter.

How much "new" electricity is coming from coal? The coal is being burned anyway, with or without electric cars. It seems to me that the conversion will make a big difference, at least on the street level.

We had some dramatic advances in oil extraction technology since then, boosting the average maximum amount of oil that could actually be extracted from, I think, around 20% to closer to 80%. Provided you're willing to do geological damage likely to cause earthquakes and contaminate water supplies. There' not really an option to do that again though - the last 20% might be extractable with enough effort, but it won't make anywhere near the difference that that 60% increase had. By the end of the century we

Seriously? Try stepping outside of a city some time. There's that annoying reality thing in the way again. Try to drop that pallet in a remote area and you've got to spend time finding someone who can do it that is not already doing something else.

It means that you are sharing your magical thinking with us and it is very annoying.

Suggesting that it's only politics in the way and if you could just say the right words somebody will "make it so" is a very juvenile and unrealistic way of looking at the world even if some managers promoted beyond their ability also possess that flaw. Societies try to teach children enough about science to cure them of such a problem but sometimes it doesn't stick.

That's not what I'm suggesting. I'm merely pointing out that if you think politics is the only problem preventing action then either the environment you are in is totally fucked up or your mindset is utterly unrealistic. Extrapolating whichever of those problems to the entire world is just going to piss people off who have physical reality in their way instead of petty politics.

That's right - no politics AT ALL in the way and robots have come a long way since 1990.But not ready yet due to a lack of available magic to match magical thinking.

Your "just remove the politics and it's easy" style mindset is a broken way to look at the world and I pity you for whatever political bullshit you have been subjected to that left you damaged in such a way. Please avoid spreading that damage.

"India can become the first country of its size which will run 100 per cent of electric vehicles. We are trying to make this program self-financing,"

They've got a LOT of electrical infrastructure to fix before this is anything more than a pipe dream. Electric outages in India aren't terribly rare in large parts of the country as of the last time I checked. Not to mention the challenges of installing all the charging infrastructure.

Having a battery powered vehicle attached to your electrical supply would actually help get you through the glitchy power. Although the extra load will make the problem worse in the short run, it will make a mild degree of unreliability easier to tolerate in the long run.

Having a battery powered vehicle attached to your electrical supply would actually help get you through the glitchy power.

So does having a tank of gasoline and a generator and that's a lot easier to do.

If you are suggesting talking about having the car power your little portion of the grid during an outage that is a bad idea on several levels. First off it would require substantial upgrades and clever controls to be put into a grid that is barely functional as it is. If India can't even get the basic transmission right I think that fancy distributed power routing is going to be beyond their abilities on any sort of wide scal

I didn't mean to imply the car's owner would power anything but their own residence in an outage, and I don't think anyone could reasonably be expecting them to do so. Obviously they'd want to power down major draws like air conditioning or appliances during such an event as well.

which by moving to EVs, they fix 2 things at once with 1 solution: EV and Building electric.
Note that given the choice of bringing in more gas stations, or bringing their electric up to a decent level, you can guess which is better for the nation.

Are you sure you got your numbers right? Are you conflating the cost of the car, cost of the installation with the consumable per mile cost? What kind of amortization are you assuming?

What I know of India is, capital is still very expensive there. You will find lots of pay-as-you-go customers, but people willing to plunk down some investment to reap the benefit of lower running costs are rare. The future is discounted heavily. So the solar city model, someone installs solar panels on the roof, sets up a me

That's not forward thinking, that is naïve. Replacing all cars by electric ones just means the energy is produced elsewhere. Like in coal powerplants. It just moves the exhaust elsewhere. The energy then needs to be transported (huge in comparison with regular household connections), then stored in batteries. Those batteries are not exactly clean to produce or recycle.

Don't get me wrong, there's a place for electric cars, but tossing fossil fuel lock stock and barrel is incredibly expensive and frankly

That's not forward thinking, that is naïve. Replacing all cars by electric ones just means the energy is produced elsewhere. Like in coal powerplants. It just moves the exhaust elsewhere. The energy then needs to be transported (huge in comparison with regular household connections), then stored in batteries. Those batteries are not exactly clean to produce or recycle.

Don't get me wrong, there's a place for electric cars, but tossing fossil fuel lock stock and barrel is incredibly expensive and frankly just naïve.

For U.S. maybe. It's got Texas, and fracking oil. Imagine a country needing three times the oil that U.S. requires, without any production of petroleum in the country.

Now, imagine, all of the petroleum is being purchased at incredibly high prices, and all of the foreign exchange reserves you have are spent on oil. So you must keep exporting everything you make, to meet your oil import bill, instead of promoting consumption led growth in your own country.

With that kind of an economic structure, replacing all gasoline cars with all electric cars makes imminent sense. And couple that with plans to generate 200GW of solar power, instead of the current 3GW of solar power. It's a radical solution for 1 Billion people, economically, environmentally and in terms of sheer market power. It's going to move the world, instead following the world.

Given respiratory disease rates and noise pollution, that "just" is a pretty extraordinary qualifier. A Delhi where cars are all electric would be a shit-ton quieter and less smelly and less bad for your health, even if the fuel supply wasn't decarbonised.

First, the pollution is now in the cities - right under most people's noses. Moving it out of the cities will improve the air in the cities, the air most people breath in. So that's a win, even if the total amount of pollution remains the same. It is likely that the total amount of pollution can go down very quickly, when moving from millions of poorly maintained two-stroke engines to much better maintained and managed large power plants. Those power plants have not only a clear eco

Isn't it easier to scrub the nastier stuff from coal plants than it is to make the every shitty old engine isn't emitting? Sure CO2 emissions might be a wash, but I'm talking SOx and NOx and whatever else which are currently causing major air quality issues in the cities. It's also easier to switch those coal plants over to something cleaner like oil or gas, which is what China has been doing, in addition to aiming to the future and solar/wind.

2030 isn't "never". Electric trucks aren't impossible, they just don't make much sense practically or economically. 2030 is in 14 years. Many trucks and other vehicles last a lot longer than that.

Even assuming electric trucks become commonplace in the next 10 years, what are they going to say to the business owner who bought diesel trucks in 2020 or 2025 (because he needed trucks, not hand-wavy promises of some utopian future)? Fuck off? If people thought they might say that, no one would buy any truck

I see 100% electric trucks delivering food to Safeway here in California. I suspect the businesses (name brand bakeries, etc) got some tax breaks to justify the capital expense for the EV's, but the logistic or charging time and limited range probably work out very well for their particular business.UPS has a few EV trucks as well.

In the early 20th century, many regions used electric milk trucks. Simple lead acid batteries, but effective when a driver only needs to go door to door at only a few miles per ho

Not so long ago I got on a 100% electric minibus, one of a few on that route (the rest uses LPG). It was a trial, but it also means the technology is there and considered reliable enough to do real-world trials with it.

These 16-passenger minibuses are not much smaller than the typical truck in India, which is used in the city but also for long-distance transport. It's not that much of a jump. The hardest part is probably going to be electrifying long-distance trucking due to the need of a really long range

I helped commission a new building for a JV. The building work was still ongoing when I arrived and the contractor needed electricity to run his drill. Before I arrived he had sent "the boy" up a nearby power pole to wrap wires onto the distribution cables. I was just about to freak out at the recklessness when I saw the drill turning at about 20RPM. There can't have been much more than 12v available.

I was told that the farmers get free electricity so they use it all for pumping water and there's little to

That Prius only reaches that very good efficiency as the engine can run at optimal load and optimal RPM all the time, running the generator, charging the batteries. A regular car or motorbike most of the time is either idling (0% efficiency) or running at sub-optimal loads and RPMs, both quickly lowering overall efficiency.

Many vehicles in India use two-stroke engines and are poorly maintained. A total efficiency as low as 10% for those vehicles may very well be a realistic number.

For the car itself, I would be thinking of an electrical version of the Tata (the sub-USD1,000 car), something like that.

Range: 100 km is enough for most people, realistically. That's a very long distance to commute in a city. Even in my rich city (Hong Kong), an average taxi is doing only about 250 km a day or so (that's some 150 miles). We have motorways, and taxis routinely are used for longer rides as well, not just short hops.

India electric cars pollute CO2 at 20 mpg equivelant [shrinkthatfootprint.com]. I guess it would be good for particulates at street level, but electrics pollute greenhouse gasses 2-2.5x more than fuel efficient diesels or 2.5-3x more than hybrids. If they get off coal by 2030 it would be good, a terrible mistake otherwise.

If the pollution is coming out of the top of great big stacks (preferably after going through scrubbers) instead of on crowded streets where people are breathing then means bringing particulate pollution from vehicles down to levels that are not a worry.Carbon dioxide is not relevant to such an aim and would have to be solved in a different way.

Most cars on the roads in India in 2030 will probably be cars that have already been built today. That's only 14 years from now. Why would everyone in a poor country junk their car within 14 years? Heck, my car is 18 years old and runs great.

Completely changing the nature of cars on the road is a generational, or even multi-generational project.

So true about the coal-powered electric plants. However, utility-scale electric transmission is a "standard interface" that can allow both consumption and production to be moved to efficient and clean alternatives asynchronously and simultaneously. So with electric cars around, it would be far easier to move both fixed and mobile consumption to renewables than it would be otherwise.